Not long ago I saw the documentary Hacking Democracy - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808532/.

I was astonished that nobody can really check how these voting machines work. It's a complete secret.
Another thing that surprised me was voting by telling some other person behind the curtain name of the candidate, believing that this person will really mark the correct one. Pure craziness.

In my country election has to be conducted in a transparent way that allows verification. Every voting "sector" has a list of voters. We show ID, sing next to our name on the list and get the form (forms are anonymous). We vote with pen and paper. We mark X on the form next to candidate name and then put this form to sealed ballot box.

We don't have electronic voting yet because there is no safe system which is easy to audit and allows to check if one is eligible to vote and provide vote anonimity in the same time.

Telecommunication is not free market. I don't know how it is in the UK but I suppose you need to obtain a licence to use frequencies used by mobile communication. Just as with radio - you can't set antenna and start broadcasting (unless you are so called pirate).

This reminds me the TV series "The Prisoner".
People there had no privacy and no responsibilities. Although they didn't seem happy but rather numb.

Of course they were sent there not by their choice. Transparency was one sided. Supervisors weren't observed by rest of the community. Unfortunately this is more realistic.

In 2005 I bought Gigabyte MB (IIRC it was GA-K8NXP-SLI) which has box 2x bigger than usual and it was designed to be a makeshift pc case. It wasn't as complete as this one (lacked of HD bay), but it was enough for testing.

"I am hereby open sourcing this privacy policy."

How can anyone "open source" plain text? There is no source and no compiled result. There is nothing you can "close", so it can be "opened" neither.

BTW Why people always say about "open sourcing" and not "opening source"? It really confuses me as non-native English speaker.

Does it mean men are more aware of reality?
We don't play farm or walk your dog games, because we know that we can just do all this things in the real life. Having virtual farm is pointless if you can have a real one. And more important - what fun is doing chores?!
Fighting the aliens is something completely different. Video games are the only way to do this. And it's real fun :)

They look ugly. They read your bank balance. No wai!

If RFID chip is on sticker why put it on mobile phone? You could just have small card in your wallet.

> "People typically have their phone much closer to hand, so I think they are more ready to pay,"
> he explains. "For example, many women put their cards at the bottom of their purse for security,
> but keep their phone at the very top for easy access."

Won't they start to put phone at the bottom of the bag for security?

And what if someone device looking like anti-theft gate, which in fact deducts money from all RFID cards passing by?
Some banks in Poland are issuing RFID debit cards, which require no authorization for payments lower than 50PLN ($17 or 12).

So we are like lab rats.

Most of the walk buttons doesn't work, but you can never be sure if this particular button works or not, so you press it anyway. Otherwise you risk standing there for ages like stupid who doesn't know how to press a button.

"In the future, machines will be made up of four -- or five or six -- modules. So if something breaks, you will get a CRU [customer-replaceable unit] sent to you," predicts Brendan Keegan, president of Worldwide TechServices, a provider of outsourced service technicians to major high-tech companies. Replacing a CRU will be about as hard as playing with Legos, he says: "If your RAM goes bad, the company might send you Module No. 6 to replace the RAM and a couple of other things. You pop the old one out and pop the new one in. And you are done."

MB, CPU, RAM, PSU, Hard Drive(s) and Graphic card - six modules, user replaceable. You've got broken RAM - we can send you a new one, which you can replace yourself without any soldering.

For less advanced - bigger units - Central Unit, Display Unit, Alphanumeric Input Unit, Pointing Device Unit. Sometimes Printing & Scanning Unit. Just connect/disconnect cables.

We already have it for years.

Reading about Apple's ridiculous patents and new products failures I think Apple is becoming the new lemon.

Digikam! It can save tags in metadata, it can geotag and it works with large photo collections. I don't know how it works on Win (available via the KDE windows installer) but on GNU+Linux it's great. And it's free (as in speech and as in beer).